Bookshops

  I can think of few images that are sadder than an almost empty bookshop or the remains of a bonfire on which books have been burnt. In the sixteenth century, the Sorbonne decreed that five hundred books were heretical. At the end of the eighteenth 7,400 titles were listed in the Index of Banned Books and, when the revolutionaries took La Bastille, they found a mountain of books that were about to be burnt. In the 1920s the United States Postal Service burnt copies of Ulysses. Until the 1960s it was impossible to publish D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in Britain and the United States legally without charges of obscenity. In 1930, the Soviet Union banned private publishing and official censorship lasted until Perestroika. Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, read Mein Kampf in 1934 and persuaded Pius XI that it would be better not to include it in the Index, to avoid infuriating the Führer. Books were publicly burnt by the most recent dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Serbian mortars tried to destroy the National Library of Sarajevo. Periodically puritan, Christian and Muslim demonstrators burn books just as they burn flags. The Nazi government destroyed millions of books by Jewish writers at the same time it was exterminating millions of Jewish human beings, homosexuals, political prisoners, gypsies and sick people; though it preserved a few—the rarest or most beautiful—with the intention of putting them on display in a museum of Judaism that would only open its doors after the Final Solution had reached a definitive conclusion. We have often been reminded of how the Nazis in charge of the death camps were fond of classical music; but people rarely consider, on the other hand, how those who designed the biggest systems of control, repression and execution in the contemporary world, who showed themselves to be the most effective censors of books, were also individuals who studied culture, who were writers, keen readers. In a word: lovers of bookshops.

  VI

  An Oriental Bookshop

  Where does the West end and the East begin? There is no answer to this question. Perhaps there was in more distant days: in Flaubert’s time, maybe, or much earlier, in Marco Polo’s, or much, much earlier, in Alexander the Great’s. Nevertheless, Western thought in ancient Greece was created in dialogue with philosophies from the other shores of the Mediterranean, so it was already in itself thought that encompassed an abstraction known as the Oriental, even though later rereadings tried to efface that. But this chapter must start somewhere, as previous ones have in Athens or in Bratislava, and so we will begin in Budapest, one of those cities—like Venice, like Palermo, like Smyrna—that seem to be adrift between two different waters that are less in contradiction than in conversation.

  It was on a summer’s day at the beginning of this century that, on one of my strolls through the city, I finally became infatuated with a peculiar hand-painted wooden box: it did not open and hence seemed completely useless. A green wooden cube with filigree decorations was on display alongside other souvenirs on one of the stalls on the banks of the Danube. It clearly had a lid but no keyhole. The stallholder waited a while until she could see I was desperately turning that hermetic object round in my hands, then she came over and whispered, “It is a magic box.” A few movements of her fingers laid bare loose pieces in the wooden structure, parts that slid one way and another to reveal a keyhole and, indeed, the crevice where the key was hidden. The device had entranced me. She realized that immediately. The haggling began.

  The dichotomy between fixed prices and haggling could be one of the axes that today polarize East and West. Another could be the material and the oral. These are uncontrollable, slippery points of opposition, but they can help us to decide whether categories like “the Western reader” or “the Oriental bookshop” have any meaning. In Marrakesh’s Djemaa el-Fna Square, the library is non-material and inaccessible to those who don’t know the local languages: the snake charmers, ointment-sellers and, above all, the storytellers, construct an incomprehensible story out of thin air accompanied by hypnotic gestures, illustrations using human bodies or drawn maps. In The Voices of Marrakesh, Canetti links this lack of understanding with a degree of nostalgia for artisanal ways of life that have died out in Europe, ones that give more credence to the oral transmission of knowledge. No doubt wisdom is the greatest value in the oral traditions that flow into that dusty, rather caravanserai-like square that every afternoon turns into a huge, informal, steaming, open-air diner. However, to idealize it is to return to an Orientalist mentality, to the clichés and simplifications in relation to the Arab and Asian worlds that we so-called Westerners like to traffic in, just like that image of an Egyptian bookseller I photographed in a small village on the shores of the Red Sea. After all, the Arab and Asian worlds are worlds of calligraphy and books with ancient, powerful texts that are closed to us unless we partially betray them through translation.

  Tangier’s proximity to Europe meant that it soon began to be Orientalized by European writers and painters, particularly the French. Delacroix was the first to turn the Moroccan city into a huge, abstract landscape. His repertoire of djellabas and horses, young boys and carpets, against a simple white architectural backdrop where a glassy sea often appears comprises the clichés that will be repeated time and again in the representation of North Africa. Eighty years later, as part of the same tradition, Matisse gave geometrical form to the city and its inhabitants: he modernized it. Among the Spanish painters, Mariano Fortuny, Antonio Fuentes and José Hernández gradually added different shades to that pictorial landscape. The latter, a member of the city’s Hispanic community, exhibited in the Librairie des Colonnes, perhaps the city’s most important cultural centre over the last sixty years. It was also where the writer Ángel Vázquez worked. He won the Planeta Prize in 1962 and fifteen years later published his great novel about the city, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni. People tend to remember the roll-call of American and French artists who made the International City one of the key focal points of twentieth-century culture, but nonconformist figures from many parts of the globe hovered around them, like the Spaniards I have mentioned, or Claudio Bravo, the Chilean hyper-realist painter who lived in Tangier from 1972 until his death in 2011, or the Moroccan artists who participated in the creation of the myth, like Mohamed Hamri the painter, or the writers Mohamed Choukri, Abdeslam Boulaich, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet or Ahmed Yacoubi.

  The official narrative of what could be called the Tangier myth places its beginning in 1947, when Paul Bowles arrived in the city. The following year his wife Jane joined him. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jean Genet, William Burroughs (and the rest of the beat generation) or Juan Goytisolo would appear later. Beyond numerous parties in private homes and certain cafés that became daily points of encounter, two main meeting places emerged for the motley band of artists and numerous other characters who came and went, tycoons and adventurers, dilettantes and musicians interested in African rhythms, actors like Hungary’s Paul Lukas (who appeared with Elvis Presley in Fun in Acapulco and in the version of Lord Jim directed by Richard Brooks, and who died in Tangier while he was looking for a place to spend the last years of his life), film directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and rock groups like the Rolling Stones. These two meeting places were, on the one hand, Paul Bowles himself, who became a tourist attraction similar to Gertrude Stein or Sylvia Beach in Paris in the inter-war years; on the other, the Librairie des Colonnes, founded in the period when the Bowleses settled in Tangier, and which has survived them both.

  The Belgian couple, Robert—architect and archaeologist, friend of Genet, André Gide and Malcolm Forbes—and Yvonne Gerofi, a librarian by training, took the helm of the Librairie des Colonnes from its founding in 1949, with the indispensable collaboration of her sister, Isabelle. It was Gallimard, the owner of the business, who offered them the post. Their marriage was paper-thin. The couple had gotten together for convenience as both were homosexuals and Tangier at that time was the ideal place for the Bowleses’ kind of family set-up. While the Gerofi sisters assumed contr
ol of the bookshop, becoming genuine celebrities in the cultural sphere, Robert devoted himself to design and architecture. Among other projects, he was responsible for reshaping the Arab palace where Forbes, the publisher and owner of the famous magazine, housed his collection of 100,000 lead toy soldiers. In a Magnum Agency photograph, an old man appears, looking at the camera, holding a white jacket and white hat, as “manager of the Forbes Estate.” The writers’ correspondence suggests the Gerofis and the Bowleses were in close contact. As far as Paul was concerned, the Gerofis’ constant presence went without saying: they were as much a part of the daily scene as the Zoco Chico or the Straits of Gibraltar. On the other hand, when she wasn’t being her nurse, Yvonne was a close friend of Jane’s, since Jane depended on her during the long periods when she was psychologically unstable. On January 17, 1968 Jane walked into the Librairie des Colonnes not recognizing anyone, her mind a complete blank, and asked to borrow two dirhams; then she took two books, and, despite the entreaties of her servant Aicha, left without paying for them.

  Whenever Marguerite Yourcenar passed through Tangier, she would drop in at the bookshop to greet her friend Robert, and whenever an American writer—like Gore Vidal—or a European intellectual—like Paul Morand—or an Arab—like Amin Maalouf—visited the white city, they inevitably ended up between shelves that, over time, came to stock a varied selection of Arab, English and Spanish titles, as well as an unexpected wealth of French books. Not for nothing was it a bastion of anti-Francoist resistance that encouraged publications by and organized meetings of exiles. The most renowned Spanish writer linked to the Librairie des Colonnes is Juan Goytisolo, who began to inhabit Arab culture in the mid-1960s, in that very city. As soon as he arrived, he wrote to Monique Lange, as we read in In Realms of Strife: “I feel happy, I walk around for ten hours a day, I’m seeing Haro and his wife, I’m not going to bed with anyone and I look at Spain from afar, full of intellectual excitement.” He writes of the inspiration for Count Julian: “The idea I’m working on is based on the vision of the Spanish coast from Tangier: I want to start off with this image and write something beautiful that will go beyond anything I have written so far.” He takes detailed notes, sketches out ideas and reads Golden Age literature profusely in his rented room. Although he later decides to settle in Marrakesh, Goytisolo will spend most of his summers in Tangier and become a supporter of its most important bookshop. In one of his most recent novels, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, where he gives a turn of the screw to the camouflaged homosexual tradition in Spanish literature, the colourful père de Trennes declares:

  Do you know whether Genet still stays at the Minzeh or has he set up in Larache? I’ve heard great things about an autobiography by one Choukri, translated into English by Paul Bowles. Have you read it? As soon as we arrive I’ll track it down in the Librairie des Colonnes. You’re a friend of the Gerofi sisters, I suppose? Who doesn’t know the Gerofi sisters in Tangier? What! You’ve never heard of them? Pas possible! Doesn’t an honorary Tangerine like you go to their bookshop? Allow me to say I don’t believe you. They’re the engine driving the city’s intellectual life!

  The case of Eduardo Haro Ibars is less well known, but perhaps more emblematic given his affinity with bisexuality, drugs and the destructive inertia that permeated the intellectual climate in Tangier. The son of exiles, born in Tangier in 1948, he infiltrated the beat circle as an adolescent who accompanied Ginsberg and Corso on their nocturnal wanderings. “I grew up rather a roamer, between Madrid, Paris and Tangier,” he wrote; but it was surely the spatial vector of Tangier–Madrid that really marked his life, because he took to the Spanish capital a nonconformist injection of beat which, as a militant homosexual, he used to nourish la movida, writing poems and songs and experimenting with all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. In the spring of 1969, after four months in prison with Leopoldo María Panero, he returned to the family home in Tangier. On another occasion, he boarded a night train that took him to Algeciras, crossed the straits, lodged in the house of Joseph McPhillips—a friend of the Bowleses’—and was helped by the Gerofi ladies, who let him do a few jobs in their bookshop. He defined himself as “homosexual, drug addict, delinquent and poet.”

  He died of complication from AIDS at the age of forty.

  Bookshops tend to survive both their owners and the writers who feed their mythology. After the Gerofis, between 1973 and 1998, the business was looked after by Rachel Muyal. As we read in Mis anos en la librairie des colonnes, as a Tangerine and neighbour of the bookshop from 1949, she brought to the cosmopolitanism she inherited her added interest in the Moroccan nature of Tangier:

  A person who honoured me with his visits was Si Ahmed Balafrej. He liked to browse through the interior design and architectural magazines. Si Adelkebir el Fassi, a resistance hero, used to accompany him. It was in the course of one of their conversations that Si Ahmed looked me in the eye and said, “Only God knows that I have done everything to ensure Tangier preserves its special status whilst remaining part of the Kingdom of Morocco.”

  Like other great booksellers who have appeared or will appear in these pages, Muyal lived within a stone’s throw of the shop and often organized cocktail parties and fiestas linked to the launch of books or cultural events, and like them she also became a point of reference, an ambassador, a link: on a weekly basis three or four people would ask her to put them in contact with Paul Bowles, who didn’t have a telephone; she’d ask for appointments via messengers and he almost always granted them.

  Later, Pierre Bergé and Simon-Pierre Hamelin arrived, and with them, the magazine Nejma, which has devoted its pages to the memory of the international myth, to that map where so many Moroccan writers found paths to translation and recognition outside Tangier. The Straits of Gibraltar have always been a place of transit between Africa and Europe, so it is only natural that the bookshop should have played a privileged role in the cultural communication between the two shores. Muyal declared in a lecture she gave to the city’s Rotary Club:

  I could feel myself in the centre of the city and even in the centre of the world in that mythical place that is the Librairie des Colonnes. That is why, I told myself, it was absolutely necessary to make the institution participate in the cultural movement in Tangier, a city that symbolizes better than any other in the world the meeting of two continents, two seas, two poles: East and West and also three cultures and three religions constituting a single, homogeneous population.

  I still have the hand-woven paper card of the Librairie Papeterie run by Mademoiselle El Ghazzali Amal in Marrakesh, on which she has proudly embossed: “Since 1956,” and I remember how disappointed I was by the scant number of books on sale and by the fact they were all written in Arabic. The Librairie des Colonnes, on the other hand, can only enthuse a European writer, because it is like any great bookshop, but just happens to be on the shores of Africa and possesses all the necessary local colour. It sells fixed-price books in French, English and Spanish, without the option of haggling that is amusing initially but soon becomes trying and wearisome. The same is the case with the other two Moroccan bookshops I have gotten to know recently: the Ahmed Chatr, also in Marrakesh, and in particular the Carrefour des Livres in Casablanca, with its stridently coloured canvases and large stock of titles in Arabic and French (it has direct links with the Librairie des Colonnes, since it sells the same small white-and-tangerine books from the Khar Bladna house that I have been collecting over the years). You feel at ease. I have rarely had such a feeling of suffocation as in that other Marrakesh bookshop, which was dedicated exclusively to religious books, entirely in Arabic, without a single breathing space. We travel to discover but also to recognize. Only a balance between those two activities can give us the pleasure we are seeking. Bookshops are almost always a sure-fire bet in that respect: their structures are soothing, because they always seem familiar; intuitively we understand the orderliness, the layout, what they have to offer, but we need at least one secti
on where we recognize an alphabet we can read, an area of illustrated books we can leaf through, a scattering of information that, in its precision—or simply by chance—we can decipher.

  That was exactly what occurred in the Book Bazaar in Istanbul: among thousands of incomprehensible covers I found a volume about Turkish travellers published in English and illustrated with photographs, Through the Eyes of Turkish Travellers, Seven Seas and Five Continents, by Alpay Kabacali, in an exquisite cased edition published by Toprakbank. As I needed that piece of the puzzle—accounts by Turkish travellers—in my historical travels collection, I was determined to buy it. Right away I was reminded of the seller of magic boxes on that Budapest street stall, where I had gone day after day, keeping firmly to my offer—a third of the asking price—until she yielded on the last day with a feigned smile of resignation. I bought two, to give to my brothers. The very minute she handed them over, wrapped in grey paper, an American tourist, holding an identical box, was asking how much they cost. The lady doubled the initial price. Without objecting, her customer also asked for two and put his hand in his pocket and, highly amused, with a wink that begged me not to say a word, she agreed to a sale six times more expensive than mine. So I asked the Turkish shop assistant who was listening to the radio behind the counter for the price of the cased volume, though it turned out that he was only keeping an eye on the merchandise, because he immediately shouted to a clean-shaven, middle-aged man who looked me in the eye and said it cost forty dollars. I think twenty-five would be a fairer price, I replied. He shrugged and went back by the route he had come.